I am reading Ward Farnsworth's Classical English Rhetoric (Godine Publisher, 2011) and wondering what a grasp of his book could do to help therapists communicate better with clients without being overly pretentious. In his preface, Farnsworth writes, "Everyone speaks and writes in patterns. Usually, the patterns arise from unconscious custom; they're models we internalize from the speech around us without thinking much about it. But it's also possible to study the patterns deliberately and to learn more about how to use the ones that make the words they arrange more emphatic or memorable or otherwise effective."

John Grinder and Richard Bandler's work in the 1970s on neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) comes to mind. NLP was modeled in part from studying the behavior and speech of outstanding therapists. The psychiatrist Milton Erickson used

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